SFTP Usage and Access

Last updated on December 8th, 2025

When hosting your WordPress® site on WP Engine, you may need to connect directly to your website’s filesystem to directly edit documents, upload/download content, delete files, or manage directories/folders.¹ On other platforms you may be used to using FTP or cPanel to access files. At WP Engine we use SFTP which works the same for managing the file system, except it uses a layer of encryption for security and is restricted to a secured port.

Additionally, SFTP is not impacted by WordPress upload limits, so large media or content in bulk can be easily uploaded.

Most commonly you’ll need SFTP access when migrating your site, performing a partial restore, or while editing/accessing a specific file (such as the wp-config.php file).

NOTE

Prefer a command line interface to manage files and directories? Check out SSH Gateway instead.

Contents hide

1 SFTP Clients

2 Locate SFTP Credentials

6 SFTP Troubleshooting

7 Common Issues

8 Update SFTP Host Keys

8.1 Update Host Key

8.2 Delete All Host Keys

8.3 Update known_hosts File

9 Limitations

SFTP Clients

Before you can connect to your site’s file system, you’ll need access to a compatible client. While we don’t restrict the programs you can use, but a program may not be compatible. We recommend one of the following clients:

FileZilla – Works on all operating systems.
Visual Studio Code – Free visual code editor, compatible with Mac and Windows. Make sure you install the SFTP extension.
Notepad ++ – Works on Windows only but also has a great live edit mode.

While you are free to use the SFTP client of your choice, your SFTP client will need to use one of the following supported ciphers:

aes192-ctr
aes256-ctr

We do not support the SFTP ciphers: SHA1, aes128-ctr, CBC, RC4, 3DES, MD5, and RIPEMD for security reasons. If your SFTP client uses one of these ciphers, it will not work properly with our platform and instead we recommend using one of the clients listed above.

NOTE

Before connecting, always ensure your client is updated, as this is a common cause of connection issues.

Locate SFTP Credentials

SFTP users can be managed from the Users and SFTP page of an environment.

From the Sites page, select the environment name
Open Users and SFTP
Select the SFTP tab

Here you will find any existing SFTP users, as well as the SFTP address (hostname) and port number for connecting to SFTP. Additionally you can view and manage existing SFTP user credentials.